In from the cold

A chance to match friendly rhetoric with practical progress

WHEN they met in Delhi last month, Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, and India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, agreed that their two countries' peace process was “irreversible”. General Musharraf—who says he is anxious to “grasp the moment”, when India and Pakistan are led by men who trust each other—has since spelled out some possible ways to end the central dispute, over Kashmir; “the earlier the better,” he says. But Pakistan still seems far from proposing a solution India could accept. And after 58 years of hostility, including three wars, negotiations could take years.

Yet, in the shorter term, this week saw a chance for the two countries to end one of the most costly and certainly the most futile of their battles. On May 26th, senior defence officials from both sides met in Rawalpindi to discuss their 21-year row over the disputed Siachen glacier, high (more than 6,000 metres) in the Himalayas. Millions of dollars have been spent simply trying to keep soldiers warm there—though hundreds have frozen to death anyway—with India clinging on to a ridge of no conceivable strategic use. Still, it will not withdraw without a credible Pakistani guarantee not to occupy the vacated ice.

General Musharraf is blunt about why Pakistan has been in no hurry to provide such a promise. The conflict is an “unnecessary irritant”, he says, but it “is pinching them more than it is hurting us.” For that reason, Pakistan has been unwilling to decouple the glacier from the broader dispute over Indian-administered Kashmir, where both India and Pakistan claim sovereignty, and many Kashmiris yearn for independence from both. But if Kashmir is to be demilitarised, as the general wants, Siachen is a good place to start.

In Delhi, the two leaders mooted a baffling triangular framework for a Kashmir solution. This would acknowledge India's refusal to redraw boundaries, Pakistan's to accept the “line of control” that divides Indian- from Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, and also the growing “irrelevance” of borders in the modern world. Floundering for a formula to resolve these contradictions, General Musharraf talks of offering the people of Kashmir a tautology: “something between autonomy and independence, like self-governance”. This could be “over-watched” by all three parties.

General Musharraf has invited separatist leaders from Indian Kashmir to Pakistan, and India has agreed to let them travel. They are expected next week. This will allow General Musharraf to claim to have won a concession from India. It will also mark a tentative first stage in engaging the Kashmiris' own representatives in a tripartite dialogue over their future. The general also hinted that Pakistan might talk to mainstream Indian-Kashmiri politicians, people the Pakistani press routinely calls “puppets”.

None of this, however, would square General Musharraf's triangle. And that he is airing such ideas with a journalist might suggest that serious talk with India over Kashmir has barely begun.